Asklemmy

I saw the struggle on the main instance, and wanted to help.

I pay $12/month for a dedicated vps.

like many others, I hosted my own for a variety of reasons.

• I like to tinker
• this was a chance to do a lot of tinkering and get in on the "ground-floor" of something I think has a lot of potential
• it gives me a bit more control over the experience, which is helpful when trying to get friends/family to give Lemmy a chance.

As for the cost, I have several VPS's which cost ~$40/year, so the cost is basically negligible.

I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.

Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.

I hosted ad-free invision and phpbb forums for almost a decade before the centralized services started. I do it because I like social media and understand the value of a vibrant commons. I've been working with computers since I was a child so hosting yet-another-app-server is not really that big of a deal and gives my users and myself a place we can call home on the internet.

The out-of-pocket cost is minimal for a small instance, for larger instances scaling issues are going to hit eventually and costs will go beyond what 1-person will bear without complaint.

Highly recommend more smaller instances.

My server costs me only about $5 USD a month and I can host thousands of users without much additional effort (my sites before would usually run to ~10k users).

**Tl;dr we do this because we want to, the act itself is often fulfillment. **

Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine.. you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms

Run it on some free or cheap cloud instance https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.

I was thinking of doing it so certain communities from the other place would feel welcome, but someone is domain squatting what I was planning

I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.

The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.

Mostly to test about how activitypub works, also paying out of pocket for $5 a month.